Data storage is a critical component for computing. In a computing device, there is a storage area in the system to store data for access by the operating system and applications. In a distributed environment, additional data storage may be a separate device that the computing device has access to for regular operations. These data storages are generally referred to storage systems. For years, the dominant storage medium for storage systems was tape because of its low cost, yet it is losing ground to disks, which are used typically in deduplicating storage systems. Deduplication in storage systems in can deliver an order of magnitude greater data reduction than traditional compression over time, and it results in few disks thus lower cost than comparable tape based storage systems.
In a deduplicating storage system, accessing to disks is often through allocated streams. Each stream is associated with a set of resources dedicated to the stream, thus such deduplicating storage system can only support a limited number of streams that are often predetermined.